[tor-reports] Trip Report for Paris in July 2012

[Andrew Lewman]

In between the Tor Dev meeting in Italy and the Privacy Enhancing
Technologies Symposium in Spain, I flew to Paris to meet some domestic
violence workers. I met them at the Grande Mosquée de Paris[0]. They
had some friends who wanted to learn more about Tor and protecting
their communications on the Internet. The place is beautiful and had a
number of tourists checking out the building and artwork.

The people I met were Moroccan and working on women's rights. Morocco
is fairly progressive on the issues, but these people frequently hear
about physical and psychological domestic abuse. They were interested
in how to safely help people in abusive situations via the Internet.
They were fairly knowledgeable about abuser/victim dynamics and power
asymmetries regarding technological know-how. They believe that quiet
direct conversation over the Internet is safer than face to face, or
other physical conversations, due to realities of the culture.

They incorrectly assumed I spoke French. We eventually talked through
translations, their broken English, and my broken French. I ended up
drawing them pictures on scraps of paper about how Tor works, how SSL
certificates work, typical monitoring points from abusers, and tried to
explain traffic analysis. We started talking about hidden services when
they ran out of time and had to go.

There was a comic interlude when they asked about MIA, which I assumed
was the Moroccan Intelligence Agency. They meant M.I.A, the
artist[1]. They were rather concerned that I thought MIA had
great surveillance powers. Apparently her 'bad girls' video was filmed
in Morocco and somehow this tied into our conversation. They did ask
that if the actual Moroccan Intelligence agency had such powers,
couldn't they detect the abuse and do something about it? A discussion
of individual liberty and paternalistic states wasn't on topic given
the little time we had together.

All in all, it was an hour chat and they seemed happy with the
results. 

[0] http://www.mosquee-de-paris.org/ or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Mosque

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.I.A._%28artist%29

-- 
Andrew
http://tpo.is/contact
pgp 0x6B4D6475